If you are reading this article, I am sure you must not be knowing what is the dark web and deep web, or you may have heard some scary stories about it from friends. You will be surprised to know that, Google knows about only 4% of the Internet and rest of it is hidden, known as the deep internet or the dark internet.
The internet is made up of 3 layers: the surface web, the deep web, and the dark web. Surface web is the only internet accessible by normal search engines such as Google and Bing – like the site www.majorfact.com you’re looking at right now.
Today in this post, you will learn:
- What is the deep web?
- What is the dark web?
- How to access the dark web?
- Special deep web browser – onion browser
- Hidden deep web sites
- Dark web vs Deep web
- Is the dark web illegal?
- Method for tor browser download
- Dark web access on Android
Infographic by: dashburst
What is the deep web?
The deep web, invisible web or hidden web is a part of the internet which is hidden from major search engines (Google, Bing etc.). Google has only 4% of access to the internet and rest of it is either password protected, encrypted or programmed in such a way that it needs a special software to browse its content. The deep web is the second layer of Internet.
The opposite of deep web is called surface web which you are using right now. Deep web contents are hidden by search engines but are not illegal, for example, images that have been uploaded on Facebook with privacy enabled on it or the secret email you sent to your friend from a third party mailing site other than major search engine products i.e. Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo.
There are many examples of deep-web if you want to know about. Any content which is accessible only after entering a password is on the deep web.
Some of the contents are not password protected but still, they’re not accessible by search engines because either they can be accessed only by some special IP addresses, or they block access to search engines by some other techniques like encryption.
Facebook also has a hidden site which can not be accessed normally and need a special software for that.
There is a secret link made by Facebook only for the deep web users which I will reveal later in this article. You will also learn how to access that link.
Google doesn’t like contents that are hidden from it. Therefore, it has made free products & services like GMAIL, Google Chrome, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Analytics, Google+, Google Hangout, Android and many such things so that it can track each and every user and no data get hidden from it.
Google doesn’t want you to go to third party websites and lock your data into their databases which are not accessible by it. By providing all these free services, Google is tracking you and has got a little bit access into the deep web.
What is the dark web?
The dark web or the dark internet is a subsidiary of deep web and is the third layer of Internet where all the illegal things are done, from drug dealing and guns to kidnapping and contract killing. And is only accessible by a special software.
The deepest part of internet is known as Mariana Web, which has many unsolved mysteries one must read about.
The dark web has become a major problem for global law enforcement bodies because it is a network of untraceable online activity and websites on the internet.
BitCoin is the only currency used in Dark Internet because it is untraceable that who is sending money to whom. And on the dark web, it becomes more difficult to track because of “mixing services” like BitCoin Laundry, which enables Bitcoin transactions to be effectively hidden completely.
Unlike .com, .org or any other domain name extensions, websites on DarkWeb has .onion extensions which are not accessible by the normal browsers (chrome and firefox). A special type of dark web browser (or deep web browser) is needed to access .onion websites on the dark web.
An online drug selling marketplace known as Silk Road (http://silkroad6ownowfk.onion) was launched in Feb 2011 and became famous within a few weeks of its launch. Later, the site was shut down on Oct 2013 by FBI and its pseudonymous founder was arrested.
Within a month of its seizing, a new website with name Silk Road 2.0 was launched on 6 November 2013, run by former administrators of Silk Road. It too was shut down, and the alleged operator was arrested on 6 November 2014. Currently, Silk Road 3.0 is running on the Dark Internet.
Dark Web vs Deep Web
| Deep Web | Dark Web |
|---|---|
| 96% of all the web contents | Small portion of the Deep Web contents |
| Hidden Unintentionally | Hidden Intentionally |
| Can be accessed through normal browsers | Can't be accessed through normal browsers |
| May not be illegal | Mostly illegal |
| No anonymity | Full anonymity |
How to access the dark web?
To access the dark web, you need a special dark web browser known as TOR browser. TOR is an abbreviation for The Onion Router, is a free software which enables anonymous communication over the internet. This onion browser is the gateway to the Dark Internet.
You can download tor browser from their official website torproject.org. Tor browser download is also available on Android phone with the name Orbot: Proxy with TOR
The name, The Onion Router is derived from the onion. Onion has multiple layers in it, similarly, TOR enables multiple layers of encryption which makes it difficult to crack. This multi-level encryption slows down the network of TOR, so you’ll experience slow surfing over TOR network.
All .onion sites are only accessible through TOR network, therefore you must only use this deep web browser to access the deep web contents otherwise, the webpage will not load.
For example, open https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/ on a normal browser, you’ll get an error that “the site does not exist”. But when you open the same URL in TOR browser, you’ll see a facebook login page. This is the official login page of Facebook, only for TOR browser users.
Visit a site thehiddenwiki.org where you’ll get many such .onion websites for different categories. The hidden internet has its own search engine named DuckDuckGo.
Who invented the dark web?
The dark web was actually created by the US government to allow spies to exchange information completely anonymously.
US military researchers developed TOR (The Onion Router) in the mid-1990s and released it into the public domain for everyone to use.
The reason was so that they could stay anonymous – it would be harder to distinguish the government’s messages between spies if thousands of other people were using the same system for lots of different things.
What are some Dark Web Stories?
You’ll get a ton of stories by people over the internet, many of them are exaggerated but some of them are real ones.
As per media reports, a 20-year-old British model Chloe Ayling kidnapped by a sex trafficking group called Black Death Group. The girl was kept in remote Italian farm house for six days after a fake promise for a photo shoot.
She was drugged and tortured before being auctioned on The Dark Web. It is said that users of the dark web pay to buy women kidnapped all over the world.
Also read:
Why Facebook stopped its artificial intelligent bot?
How a virus attacked computer of 100+ countries?
Great Information
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